


13

by seaer



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 09:17:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15883101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seaer/pseuds/seaer
Summary: you think this to yourself, silent mantra of teenaged lonesomeness, you are thirteen and you are the only person in the universe and fuck. your ribs hurt. the apartment is wrapped thin with the hush of 2am but still you swear you can hear him turn in his sleep. do men like him sleep? it wouldn’t be unlike him if all he did when you were snoring like a baby was tap away at his weirdo websites.





	13

**Author's Note:**

> too much dignity to subject myself to a hs reread but i will write pointless chara (?) studies

you wake in the night from the pain. your left eye is black and you can feel it throb even now like a ripe purple fruit, across the room something snarled with wires blinks a blue pinprick of light into the sticky texas gloom.

you are thirteen and you are the only person in the universe. you think this to yourself, silent mantra of teenaged lonesomeness, you are thirteen and you are the only person in the universe and fuck. your ribs hurt. the apartment is wrapped thin with the hush of 2am but still you swear you can hear him turn in his sleep. do men like him sleep? it wouldn’t be unlike him if all he did when you were snoring like a baby was tap away at his weirdo websites. 

you walk to the bathroom and flick the lightswitch and then think better of it. something in the house moves in the shivering dark after you turn out the light and you are primally, sickeningly afraid before you shelve it away so you can take a piss uninterrupted. when you wash your hands the blood dried on the porcelain from when you were hunched over the sink, freshly beat to hell and back, loosens and runs away. what’s left is a faint outline of red, suggestion of siblinghood. terror is a faraway thing. why would you be scared of him?

you catch yourself in the mirror in the half-light from outside the window. at this hour in the city there’s a gritty sort of greyness that casts everything into a ghost; the shadows on your face make you seem a million years older. your swollen wine-coloured eye stares back at you like a reminder.

you touch a tentative finger to where the darkness ends and wonder if he loves you. a breeze runs in through the window and then through you like a clean sword, and at thirteen, as the only person in the universe, you desperately wish that you knew the answer.

-

years later (but not many) you wake in the night and you start when you realise nothing hurts. karkat is making little chirping half-snores in his sleep, where he’s curled against you, and for a long moment you are thirteen again, soul bare and young and wide-eyed. you can picture him standing over your bed, moonlight reflecting off his shades, spry and alive again and ready to hurt. 

then karkat digs his face into the soft crook of your bare collarbone and pulls you closer and your bro dissolves into the dark, illusion that loved you wrong if he ever did, illusion to forget. 

-

TT: If it’s worth anything at all my mom would have adored you. 

TG: all jokes and ha has aside miss lalonde im gonna treasure that for the rest of my shitass slapdash life 

**Author's Note:**

> [kofinch](http://kofinch.tumblr.com) on tumblr


End file.
